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Thomas Sowell

Republicans deserved to lose

It is not just Republican presidential candidates who cannot be bothered to articulate a coherent argument, instead of ad hoc talking points. Have you yet heard House Speaker John Boehner take the time to spell out why Barack Obama’s argument for taxing “millionaires and billionaires” is wrong?

It is not a complicated argument. Moreover, it is an argument that has been articulated many times in plain English by conservative talk-show hosts and by others in print. It has nothing to do with being worried about the fate of millionaires or billionaires, who can undoubtedly take care of themselves.

What we all should be worried about are high tax rates driving American investments overseas, when there are millions of Americans who could use the jobs that those investments would create at home.

Yet Obama has been allowed to get away with the emotional argument that the rich can easily afford to pay more, as if that is the issue. But it will be the issue if no one says otherwise.

Blowback

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They could have done that but didn’t because the GOP is also the tax and spend party. The reason the GOP didn’t propose spending cuts is the same reason they never do, because they don’t actually want to cut spending, they just use deceit to trick voters who do want to cut spending into voting for them. When people like Boehner, Romney and even Paul Ryan talk about “spending cuts” they really only mean a slight decrease in the amount that spending automatically increases each year. They’re just adjusting a meaningless line on a projection chart. It’s a shell game. Even after “cutting spending” (reducing the rate of increase), they just follow it up with other bills that increase spending to even higher than before. One Congress can’t bind future Congress’, so all of these numbers they throw around about cutting a trillion dollars over 10 years are just lies. None of the spending cuts are ever in the first year, the only one that matters, they are always in the last 9, and future Congresses certainly don’t want to cut spending either, that’s how they pay off their cronies and special interests for all the campaign donations and cushy lobbying jobs after they leave office.

The GOP (the elites) are the party of despicable cheats and liars. People like Ron Paul threaten to end their con-game and so they’ve systematically smeared him for years, and all too many people on our side who should have supported him if they really want to save America, instead stood by while he and his supporters were systematically cheated by the GOP establishment.

While I agreed with a lot of his domestic and fiscal policies the man was essentially a die hard isolationist (no matter how much libertarians try to deny the term) to a dangerous level and there is no way this voter was going to vote for a Truther either. RP was a man with some good ideas wrapped in too much crazy. It is what it is.

He will never, EVAH win on a nation level. Period. The sooner libertarians accept that fact the sooner they can put out a viable candidate.

Isolationism is a social/economic term. Ron Paul supports free trade and cultural exchange, the opposite of isolationism. The word you are looking for is non-interventionist. While Ron Paul is more non-interventionist than I am, he is far more rational and down-to-earth than the neocons who run the GOP. Their foreign policy over the past dozen years has been a misguided wreck and is a huge factor why America is failing in the present. The neocon GOP establishment are the ones who’ve been smearing Ron Paul for all these years because he is one of the few people on the national stage who exposes the truth and threatens the corrupt status quo.

If conservatives want to change the status quo they have to stop voting for it.

Ron Paul isn’t a truther. That was just neocon propaganda they are forced to spread because Ron Paul is one of the few threats to their police/warfare/welfare state. He is one of the few public figures who is not afraid to speak the truth and expose their lies so they smear him so that people who should support him, don’t.

Some of Ron Paul’s supporters are truther’s and so the neocon establishment used the truther libel to smear Ron Paul as well, and too many conservatives have been conditioned over the years to fall for underhanded tactics like that.

While I agreed with a lot of his domestic and fiscal policies the man was essentially a die hard isolationist (no matter how much libertarians try to deny the term) to a dangerous level and there is no way this voter was going to vote for a Truther either.

“Isolationist” in the right-wing vocabulary is your code-word for “points out that we cannot afford to be the world’s cop/babysitter in perpetuity”. And his ‘truther’ links are about as valid as his ‘nazi’ links, which is to say they exist only in the fevered minds of wingnut slandermonkies.

He will never, EVAH win on a nation level.

Certainly not when he – unlike liberals – actually consistently opposes the war industry and its unpaid sockpuppets.

Remember back during the Bush years when conservatives brought up all manner of quotes from Democrats supporting the Iraq war and looking for WMD’s? They d@mn well supported the whole shebang, they just wanted to take advantage of the frothing loony anti-Bush sentiment.

Period. The sooner libertarians accept that fact the sooner they can put out a viable candidate.

Yakko77 on January 1, 2013 at 3:00 PM

As if you had any room to talk to about what a viable candidate looked like after the last two humiliating elections.

According the Texas Independent, Paul was one of only four House Republicans to break with his party’s earmark moratorium in 2011: “Paul sent 41 earmark requests totaling $157,093,544 for the 2011 Fiscal Year” and “For Fiscal Year 2010, Paul requested 54 total earmarks, adding up to $398,460,640 in pork that the former presidential candidate sought to bring home to his district.” (The paper noted that his 2010 requests “were made prior to the House Republican Conference’s voluntary ban on filing earmarks.”) His earmark requests are listed on his congressional Web site.

After Hurricane Katrina, Paul opposed government assistance for victims, telling The Post: “Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government? Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?” He even even wrote in a 2005 column that “In several disasters that have befallen my Gulf Coast district, my constituents have told me many times that they prefer to rebuild and recover without the help of federal agencies like FEMA, which so often impose their own bureaucratic solutions on the owners of private property.”

Yet in fiscal year 2010 Paul requested tens of millions of dollars in earmarks to assist with hurricane recovery for his district. His requests included: $51.5 million for “Reconstruction of Bluewater Highway Hurricane Evacuation Route Between Brazoria and Galveston Counties in Texas”; $8 million for “replacing recreational fishing piers damaged during hurricanes”; $20 million to fund a rural hospital in Chambers County, Texas (arguing that “Chambers has been adversely impacted by hurricanes Rita and Ike and by the displacement of individuals by Hurricane Katrina”); and $1 million for Trinity Episcopal School “to assist with recovery in Hurricane stricken Galveston, Texas.”

Which raises a question for Rep. Paul: Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people of his congressional district?